Depending on your viewpoint, local radio arrived in Stevens Point either in the early 1920s or the late 1940s. Broadcasting Yearbook says WLBL, a state-operated radio station now licensed to Auburndale, signed on the air in Waupaca in 1922. It moved to Stevens Point in 1924, according to Malcolm Rosholt‘s "Our County, Our Story." It had studios in the Whiting Hotel before moving into what’s now the Communication Building at the UW-Stevens Point. At first, the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture operated WLBL, but the legislature transferred control to the State Radio Council in 1951, and the station ‘s transmitter moved to Auburndale. The call letters WLBL stand for "Wisconsin, Land of Beautiful Lakes,"
In 1948, Stevens Point got its first locally licensed commercial radio station with the establishment of WTWT by Rosa Evans and her husband, Ralph. He ran a broadcast engineering business in Milwaukee, and together, they built the first station authorized to broadcast from Portage County. Later, the call letters became WSPT. The Evans sold the property about four years later to a group of Minnesota investors, which included Warren Burger and Harry Blackmun. Both men later became United States Supreme Court Justices, and Burger served as Chief Justice. Burger died in 1995, and Blackmun lived until 1999.
That group sold the stations to Sentry Insurance in 1968. Sentry added WRJN in Racine a year later, and over the next several years, purchased stations in five other Upper Midwest cities. In 1986, the company exited the broadcast business. Since then, the Stevens Point stations have had two other owners, Sage Broadcasting of Stamford, Connecticut and the present operator, Muzzy Broadcasting.
WFHR in Wisconsin Rapids, which first signed on in 1940, once had a Stevens Point studio which it used to broadcast Portage County news three times each day. Many people remember the late Stevens Point announcer, Bob Daniels, who broadcast news and sports, hosted polka music during the noon hour and also managed the Stevens Point operation for the Huffman family. (The call sign "WFHR" stood for "William F Huffman Radio.’)
The Federal Communications Commission authorized what was to become WSPT to broadcast at 1010 kHz on the AM dial. It was one of many new stations to sign on across the country following World War II. But it received authorization to transmit only from local sunrise to sunset. The limitation to daylight hours-only broadcasting was necessary to protect the signals of other, more powerful stations in Toronto and New York on the same frequency. (During the day, AM radio stations transmit their signals via ground wave, but at night, sky wave transmissions carry radio station signals considerable distances. Too many signals result in interference, and since the United States population was still mostly rural in the 1940s, the government wanted to make certain that people living in the countryside were able to receive clear signals from powerful big city stations, free from interference.) After a period when the studio was located at the transmitter on Forest Street North, WSPT moved into downtown studios on Main Street. In 1966, the station relocated to a new building on Division Street.
Stevens Point first FM station - WSPT-FM - signed on the air in 1961. Not many people had FM receivers in those days, so the owners contracted with the Copps Corporation to furnish background music and occasional food commercials for broadcast in their stores. That move produced revenue for the station - enough to keep it operating. As FM became more popular, WSPT ‘s operators decided to simukast - that is, broadcast the same programming simultaneously on both their AM and FM stations. Since WSPT had limited broadcast hours, listeners who wanted local radio service before sunrise or after sunset could buy an FM radio, and receive programming pretty much full time. (While WSPT could broadcast from 5:15 am until 8:45pm during the long days of June, short December days meant that during that month, the state could be on the air only from 7.30 am to 4.15 pm.)
The second operation to go on the air in Stevens Point was WWSP, the UW-Stevens Point ‘s student-operated facility, which signed on the air for the first time in 1968. Bary and Sharon Nienow established WYTE, a country music station in Whiting in 1985, and a broadcaster from Texas built WMGU, (Magic 105) in Stevens Point a few years later. It programmed soft hits until going off the air in the early 1990s. Several years later, the frequency was sold and moved to Marathon City. Now called WKQH, it broadcasts classic hits from the WSPT studios.
WIZD, although licensed to Rudolph in Wood County, went on the air in the fall of 1990 from studios in Plover, broadcasting "Oldies" music. Although it isn‘t in Portage County, WGNV, a station broadcasting religious programming, lies just west of the Portage- Wood County line, north of Milladore.
So much for a brief history of radio in the Stevens Point area.